January 2024 Print

by John Rao, D.Phil. Oxon.

Given the fact that the human person is a unified being of both spirit as well as flesh and blood, it is utterly impossible for either Church or State to command him to obey in its own particular sphere without having an essential impact upon the other. As Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, the greatest of the early editors of the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, indicated in 1851, any attempt to deny this mutual impact is destined to lead to a disaster that is ultimately destructive to the missions of both Church and State:

Man being essentially one, though composed of two substances, whoever commands man must of necessity influence both parts substantially composing the same individual. To exclude the Church, therefore, from commanding the body, and the State from obliging conscience, is a separation against nature. The two powers will always find themselves on the same field, either united for the purpose of order, or combating and triumphing over one another. Those, therefore, who through hatred of the Church or out of a desire for unlimited freedom, promote separation cannot do anything other than permit either full anarchy of consciences or chain them under material force.^[1]

It is, course, true that there never was a time when the orthodox understanding of a separation permitting the harmonious cooperation of Church and State was somehow ‘definitively’ established. Abusive civil authorities paying lip service to religion have regularly sought to interfere in the spiritual realm from the moment of the creation of a “Christian” Roman Empire onwards. Making matters worse, they have always enjoyed the support of a ready supply of self-interested ‘court bishops’ eager to cooperate with offensive political authorities in encouraging a given state’s particular invasive predilections.

Sad to say, such abusive and self-interested actions provided later bitter critics of the ‘separate but harmonious’ argument much of the material they needed to depict its “true” spirit as being totally hypocritical and venal in nature. Yet none of this intrusive and traitorous behavior can be considered a surprise from a Christian standpoint, given that the Church takes for granted that the battle for the victory of Christ the King in a world badly marred by sin will be an imperiled ‘Drama of Truth’ until the end of time. Moreover, the convoluted justifications of their illicit activity offered by the interlopers in question and the history of ecclesiastical opposition to their nefarious schemes make it sufficiently clear that people on both sides of the fence knew that the Church-State game was in no way always being played according to the proper rules.

Separation of Church and State = Enslavement to Materialism

But let us now focus on Taparelli d’Azeglio’s insistence upon what playing by the illicit rules set down by the modern understanding of separation of Church and State really entails. I would argue that he very much understood that there could never be any other ultimate outcome possible than the second one he identified: an enslavement of the spirit to material forces. Taparelli mentions the first outcome—the “full anarchy of consciences”—because of his historical sense of the peculiar mixture of pragmatic and ideological factors inspiring the development of the separation experiment: the need to deal with major religious divisions in the Anglo-American world on the one hand and the anti-social individualism lying behind what became known as Liberalism on the other.

This poisonous mix hid the dangers of the willful individual materialism promoted by liberal thought for a significant period of time under an exterior image of friendship for a religious ‘freedom’ that was openly espoused by the new United States. It was the seemingly amicable character of a secular American State granting liberty to all those religious forces willing to make a peaceful use of it that enabled John Courtney Murray, Jacques Maritain, and their allies to plead successfully in the 1960s for its acceptance by the universal Roman Church herself.

Murray, Maritain, and their colleagues leaned heavily upon the importance of recognizing the happy lesson taught by the pragmatic acceptance of religious liberty and the separation of Church and State realized through the American system. Freed from any connection with the civil authority, the Christian message was said to be able to advance on the basis of its innate Truth alone. And now, they argued, given what they claimed was an ever growing revulsion with the totalitarian methods of the various anti-religious ideological forces that had plagued twentieth century life, what could be more obvious than the value of a free and open society for the march to total victory of the teaching of the Prince of Peace and its exaltation of the dignity of the individual?

What should have been more obvious was the unrestricted opportunity for ensuring a mindless, criminal manipulation of religion—and all of civilized life along with it—to be found in the devil’s brew offered by this ‘pragmatic’ English-born and American perfected ‘separation with a smiling face.’ Even in its gestation period, as it slowly bubbled to perfection, it allowed for a virtually unperceived return of the kind of theocratic, syncretistic, civil religion familiar to the God-States of the ancient world. And yet this preparatory stage only represented a temporary ‘holding action’ until the strongest, nihilist, most materialist and most totalitarian among the anarchic ‘consciences’ at work within it could use the State to impose their oligarchic will upon Christianity, crushing the true dignity of the human person in the process: the ultimate outcome reaching its full fruition in our own tragic time.

Certainly, warning signs of this ultimate outcome were highly visible long before the Second Vatican Council. After all, Taparelli’s prediction did not emerge without examining the evidence already available to him. Belgium, Italy, and eventually France as well all gave poignant examples from the mid-nineteenth century onwards of what the liberal encouragement of separation under the common slogan of the need for a “free Church in a free State” meant in practice on the European continent. Here, ‘legitimate’ Church ‘freedom’ was defined as extending only as far as liberal philosophical and political thought regarding the individual and society permitted it to be exercised, with education, the moral law, and even devotional practices being forced to toe the ideological line accordingly.

Under these circumstances, nineteenth century Catholics quickly recognized that they had to remain on a permanent war footing in dealing with a “free State” that demanded on the basis of its very principles that Christians burn as much incense in front of its idols as they often had had to do in consequence of the merely practical abuses of civil authorities in nations where a union of the two authorities was the rule. Sometimes, as in Belgium, believers were mobilized for warfare with great success, that country’s Catholic Party gaining control of the government well into the 1900s. But by then the problematic American experiment came to be marketed on a global scale, and the Belgians, like everyone else, learned that the Catholic Social Doctrine they had implemented in their own land was now considered to be a danger to human dignity and actually perilous to the victorious march of Christianity itself.

Ganging Up on Catholicism

Let us preface our discussion of the more poisonous effect of a supposedly pragmatic separation of Church and State by noting that the more aggressive Liberalism of the continental states was dictated by the fact that it was dealing straightforwardly with the vigorous opposition coming from one dominant religious denomination alone. This made the victory of the essentially anti-Catholic elements of the Liberal vision more dependent upon adopting a modern version of the kind of open assault upon Faith launched by Antiochus IV Epiphanes against the single dominant Jewish religion, its Temple Cult, and its Law as a whole in ancient Judaea.

But there was a huge problem with displaying the true character of Liberalism openly in Catholic lands—as was also the case with Antiochus and his attempt to impose the commands of the God-State in Judaea. Yes, ‘court clerics’ and time-serving word merchants willing to propagandize for the victory of an illicit theocratic ‘union’ of religion and State under secular control, along with the redefinition of the Faith and its practice this entailed, were ready to cooperate in both the modern as well as the ancient assaults. Nevertheless, the brutally obvious horror of the attacks in question aided mightily in the call of the Belgian Catholics—as it did in that of the Maccabees—for an immediate and militant defense of their cause.

Alas, the “nice and easy does it” approach of the supposedly “religion-friendly” form of separation was destined slowly to eat away at and then utterly destroy that healthy spirit of resistance to an open enemy, allowing all forms of anti-Christian naturalism to use separation to reach their vicious goals. It did so because the “pragmatic” grounds of granting that religious tolerance in England, which then led to full-fledged freedom and separation of Church and State in America, involved major problems for the maintenance of the influence of the Faith—and the survival of the Faith itself—in any denominational form whatsoever; problems that the ‘doctrinal’ elements of Liberalism were able to exploit to assure the victory of its anti-Christian, individualist, and ultimately nihilist materialism.

Motives of Separation

Let us begin the dismantling process by noting that what seems to be a perfectly understandable desire to end the terrible violence caused by religious wars by means of a grant of liberty to all denominations willing to evangelize peacefully proved in the long run to be a magnificent tool for their universal emasculation. Both Voltaire and James Madison understood that the classic defense of religious toleration offered by John Locke guaranteed that so many different versions of Christianity would be given the right to propagate their wares that they would all end by ‘checking and balancing’ one another into oblivion. Their ‘free’ activity would really be limited to their own private clubhouses. The more the religious forces that were at liberty to go about their business, the less the chance for any one of them to dominate the public realm.

Those Protestants known as Pietists provided two further guarantees that the public realm would not be shaped by religious doctrine, the first of which stemmed from their horror over the stimulus that dogmatic quarrels among the many Reformed denominations was giving to the growth of atheism. They argued that battling over theological doctrines should be abandoned, and be replaced by an emphasis upon what was actually the true essence of the Faith: living a ‘pious,’ pragmatic life of charity in dealing with one’s neighbors. Christian morality, they said, was so ingrained in people that it was more effectively protected by what could now be called an eternal, immutable ‘common sense’ than by divisive authoritative Church teachings backed by the physical power of the State.

Secondly, influential English Pietists were very much influenced by the passion for observing and experimenting with nature inspired by Francis Bacon. They were major associates in the work of the Royal Society of London and its imitators throughout the European world. Pietist thinkers saw such labor as uncovering a harmonious network of natural laws proving the designs of the Creator God. Moreover, such so-called ‘physico-theologians,’ defending God by reference to physical science rather than to religious doctrines, believed that the technological benefits coming from the practical application of natural laws, enabling men to do the Christian charitable work of feeding the hungry and curing the sick more successfully than ever before, proved that the blessing of God lay upon this endeavor.

But what would control the public realm when it was left to a reliance on ‘common sense’? What would control it when that ‘common sense’ was combined together with an adulation of the successes gained by a technological exploitation of observation and experiment itself inspired by Francis Bacon? He defined the purpose of knowledge as that of gaining ‘power’ over nature. Would that kind of ‘common sense’ really still be the expression of an eternal, immutable, Christian morality? How would one know whether material power concerns exploiting ‘whatever worked’ had taken precedence over knowing, loving, and serving God, if all reference to doctrinal principles were abandoned as being divisive and dangerous to practical success?

In fact, carte blanche to take over the public realm was now given to doctrinaire Liberalism, whose founder—also the chief author of the ‘religious tolerance’ principle—was John Locke. Locke’s Liberalism sees the social order as being nothing other than a collection of individuals, and individuals as beings who have nothing to guide them in creating their distinct personalities than the need to satisfy the material sensual impulses that alone form them.

We have already seen that religious liberty works to thwart the threat that Christian doctrine might pose for such satisfaction of individual material needs. Locke’s weakening of the authority of the State through the checks and balances created by division of powers removes that danger to fulfilling the demands of personal material ‘freedom’ as well. But by any traditional Christian doctrinal standpoint, what this actually means is the handing over of the public realm under the system of separation of Church and State to the unguided activity of individual fallen men all subject to the plague of Original Sin.

Still, Pietists and physico-theologians thought that Christian men would continue to restrain themselves and play the game of life according to ‘eternal, immutable, common sense’ rules. It looks as though John Locke, who was also the secretary of the Whig Movement responsible for the Glorious Revolution, believed something similar—and most importantly that material men ruled by common sense would always understand that the freedom to gain property to satisfy their sensual needs had to remain at the top of their concerns. The Founding Fathers of the United States followed his lead in this regard, with their successors creating the theocratic civil religion of Americanism to ensure that every citizen of every religious denomination commit himself to believing that the Creator God Himself had blessed the fundamental documents of the system they had put in place, with the constitutional separation of Church and State as one of its doctrinal pillars.

Separation of Church and State = Destruction of Church and State

Unfortunately, however, nature needs Revelation and Grace to function properly. Without their aid, the machinery of a system handed over to the free play of Original Sin means freedom for the satisfaction of any material passion, physical or intellectual, whatsoever. As Justice Anthony Kennedy said in 1992, it ultimately means that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life.”

Such freedom worked against preserving the oligarchy that dominated the American founding in the form that it wanted at that moment. It had within it an innate tendency to degenerate, and, with that degeneration, to ensure construction of an order based upon the dictates of the strongest practitioners of materialist freedom: libertines and criminals, who were perfectly willing to rebuild the power of the State to serve their needs. Such criminals maintained their alliance with the American civil religion and its claims to hide, justify, and ennoble their oppression of the weak. All, together, guarantee that the system gradually spirals downward, ending in that boring, corrupted sameness identified by the nineteenth century Catholic writer, Louis Veuillot, as a chief characteristic of a coming global “Empire of the World.”

Only Catholicism, with its correct vision of the union of spiritual and temporal power, could protect against this nihilist and ultimately totalitarian tendency. But it, too, was seduced by the ‘nice and easy does it’ claim that separation guaranteed the Church ‘freedom.’ Hence, in order to practice this freedom properly, it saw that it had to avoid bringing its doctrines into the public realm. It learned that freedom involved allowing the individual members of the Mystical Body of Christ to rip their communal authority to shreds; that all attempts to hold onto Church authority could be nothing other than assaults on ‘real freedom,’ condemnable in the eyes of the anti-doctrinal God of Pietism and the anti-institutional vision of the liberty-loving Liberals; that liberty for all communities, religious or otherwise, amounted to nothing other than the freedom to be impotent and to self-destruct.

Catholicism under the system of separation of Church and State built in America and now spread about universally, has no hope of survival as a distinct belief or culture. It is obliged to destroy whatever distinguishes itself in order to practice a “non-divisive, integrating, materialist freedom,” and then to repeat, as a dogma, the belief that it has never before experienced such great liberty to fulfill its mission. It is forced to dismantle what is most essential to its character, especially what has been corrected and transformed through the message of the Incarnation, in order to fit in to a jungle society. It is condemned to see its children treat this dismantling and emasculation as the obvious fulfillment of the real Catholic potential. And it is conditioned to accept the fact that the guidelines for this dismantling and emasculation of its true mission will change along with whoever is the strongest ideological, libertine, and criminal force of the moment and whatever it is that it wishes.

As systems go, I would rather take my risks with abuses that inevitably will occur with the proper union of Church and State. As always, our future lies in taking seriously our past.

Endnotes

^[1] “Lo Stato Separato dalla Chiesa,” La Civiltà Cattolica, 1, 7 (1851), 263.

TITLE IMAGE: The Duel after the Masquerade, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904).